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Some incongruities have been around so long that they hardly ever come under the scrutiny they cry out for, like the fact that Utah's pro basketball team is called the Jazz. Or that, when markets become less confident in the pace of economic growth, growth stocks tend to outperform.

We are in the midst of one of those periods. As the domestic economic data have softened up a bit after the oddly warm winter, European sovereign stress has resurfaced with a Castilian accent, and emerging-market economies have threatened to quit emerging in recent weeks, large, traditional growth stocks are leading.

The easy, logical and mostly correct explanation for such a shift is that as growth, broadly speaking, becomes scarce, investors favor mega-cap growth stocks—virtual corporate nation-states, really—for their stability and capacity to expand organically (if in slim increments).

Aside from the notion that these consistent-growth companies can grow even if the global economic cycle hits another stutter step, investor appetites are also influencing this market segment. Though the recent little corrective retreat in the indexes hasn't been terribly dramatic at the index level yet, underneath the market has taken on a more defensive cast. Small-caps have underperformed since early March and Treasury yields below 2% are a discouragement to macro bulls or "reflation" rooters.

The rediscovery of the Nifty Fifty-type stocks also reflects the grudging, skeptical manner in which the public is re-engaging with equities, to the limited extent that it is. As Ben Inker of asset manager GMO put it in a client letter last week, central-bank policies have forced a risk-conscious asset allocator to grapple with a world devoid of truly risk-free assets, with cash and Treasury yields acutely vulnerable to monetary-policy shifts, political fecklessness and inflation. So, stable equities emerge as a split-the-difference option for many, especially at a time when a third or so of large-cap stocks have dividend yields above the 10-year Treasury rate.

So maybe, just as Apple kept going up in a straight line until the very moment it reached the average market multiple, maybe Coke and Colgate and McDonald's will keep rising until their yields (now all between 2% and 3%) reach parity with the Treasury yield.

This all could be a temporary rotation, of course, to be upended by, say, emerging-market central banks turning on the monetary spigot and sucking capital into riskier, credit-sensitive and commodity-attuned investments. Or, conversely, should the moderating economic numbers or European credit metrics erode, stocks would suffer, as in the past two summers.

Still, if one places those scenarios in the "known unknowns" file, it appears traditional growth stocks should retain the benefit of the doubt for a while.

Ned Davis Research argues that, relative to their respective histories, the median growth stock is less expensive than average, while value is merely neutral. And collective investor exposure to growth stock funds relative to value funds remains well below its two-decade average.

(As a reward for making it this far down the page: Utah's NBA team started as the New Orleans Jazz before moving to Salt Lake City in 1979.)

E*TRADE SHARES WERE CITED HERE in a bullish item late last year below $9 (Streetwise, Nov. 21, 2011) after the market punished them for the company's decision not to shop itself to a buyer. Since then, the stock (ETFC) is up 27%, and earnings last week beat forecasts nicely.

While the core brokerage business remains challenged by weak retail trading volumes and low rates on cash balances, E*Trade, at $10.48, still appears cheap, near tangible book value, and at some point industry consolidation will rekindle. Meanwhile, Wall Street analysts remain encouragingly skeptical, with only three Buys out of 16 ratings.